A few weeks ago we decided it was time to upgrade the laptop. My wife wanted a newer laptop and asked if she could have mine and then we could buy a new one for me to use. While I’m always happy to get a new laptop, I really didn’t want to spend the money. As a general rule, I won’t buy any electronics or other non-necessary stuff out of our “general fund”. This blog, along with other streams of income helps me create a bit of a slush fund that I keep in an online account. As we talked it over, we both agreed the slush fund would be the best account to use to pay for this.
There were a few things that brought us to the decision to buy a laptop. My wife’s laptop, which we’ve had for nearly three years, has a tendency to heat up and just shut down. (HP). Over the last year it has gotten worse, even after we bought little plastic feet to prop it up off the desk. Besides the tendency to shut off, it also lacks enough memory and is quite the dog when performing regular tasks such as email and web surfing.
The other thing that helped us decide to buy a new laptop was that we were getting an additional discount off Dell.com due to an employee purchase program promotion. (We don’t work for Dell but Dell sometimes has agreements with major customers to provide discounts to employees of partner companies). Anyway, let’s just say it blew the socks off any Fatwallet deal.
As I configured a potential laptop on Dell.com for the 60th time, (believe me, over the span of three weeks, I must have visited the site about that many times trying to find the best rock bottom deal I could), I noticed that adding additional memory to the configuration really boosted up the price. I did some digging and found out what kind of memory it took and then priced it out on a few sites. What I found shocked me. If I had upgraded the laptop to 4 gigabytes via Dell, it would have cost me an additional $375, and that is only upgrading from the baseline of 2 gigabytes. So, in a sense, I was paying $375 for 2 gigabytes of memory. When I checked at Newegg.com, I found that they sold 2 gigabytes of memory (1 stick) for only $49 and had free shipping. HOLY SMOKES! I couldn’t believe the price difference.
Needless to say, I ended up buying the cheapest memory option that Dell had when I finally purchased the laptop and then ripped both the old memory sticks out and installed (2) 2 gigabyte sticks in the laptop for only $98 for a total savings of $277. Did I mention I love a good deal?
Make sure that if you are loading up with 4GB of memory that you have a 64-bit OS. If you are using a 32-bit one (XP or Vista 32 Bit), then some memory may go unused due to technical limitations of a 32-bit computer/OS.
Thanks Traciatim,
I did validate that the system could use up to 4 gigs prior to buying the ram, so it worked out perfectly. 4 gigs isn’t what it used to be though, I’ll tell you that. Vista is using over 1 gig all by itself.
And this didn’t void your Dell warranty?
So what model did you get? I too went and got a new laptop from dell. Went to get a dell vostro 1500 (located in small business section)for a little over $600 (intel 2 core, windows xp, 2G, 160hd) great price and it had windows xp as an option!
Nice job, though I hate to point out that rather than getting a great deal, you simply avoided getting an awful deal :)